Osteolysis

Osteolysis - Osteolysis refers to an active resorption or dissolution of bone tissue as part of an ongoing disease process.

While bone resorption is commonly associated with many diseases or joint problems, the term osteolysis generally refers to a problem common to artificial joint replacements such as total hip replacements, total knee replacements and total shoulder replacements.

In total hip replacement, the particles worn off the gliding surface of the ball and socket joint often cause osteolysis. As the body attempts to clean up these loose particles of plastic or metal, the bone grows away from the implant, causing it to loosen. This may require a revision surgery (replacement parts).

It's a lovely little term I learned today. Apparently...in my knee, under the kneecap in particular I have a metal piece that replaced the arthritic bone and on top of that is/was plastic. I say was because it looks like the plastic has worn down to the metal and when this happens little bits and pieces flake off and embed into the bone. The bone treats this as foreign and bone is drawn away from these pieces. That is the best way I can describe it for now., The result is that the knee doesn't track with the kneecap like it should and there is alot of popping and clanging. It doesn't hurt but you can actually take the kneecap and move it to a point where it feels like two pieces of metal are clanging.

Not so good.

So....there is no infection which is a plus. So after a nice long talk with the chief surgeon who does these resurfacings we decided, well he decided that a new knee (total knee replacement) is the best option for me.

So as I told Shelly, pencil me in for Jan 3rd where I will go in for number 10 on the surgical count for this knee.

Here's To Your I Phone

Recently I received an email from my brother Jim. He took a picture with his new iphone. Honestly, I would like to think of myself a gadget type of person and we had looked at the iphones when they came out.

The point that turned me away from the iphone was that AT&T locked you into a data plan. We currently have two cell phones and 700 minutes per month. Between the two of them and even though we use our cell phone primarily over the landline we never come anywhere close to using those minutes in a month's time. I think collectively we're lucky if we use 300.

So if I wouldn't use it to hop onto the internet, say while I am shopping at the mall, there was a feature that I really don't need. We as a household don't buy our music from itunes so there's another feature lost to us. I know there are many people who are suffering now from carpal tunnel syndrome who love these features and that is fine. For me, the iphone wasn't worth the $$.

Now onto something different.

There have been attempts over the last 10 years to bring a device into your living room that would effectively link all your media together. You could access sound, movie or picture files that are stored on your computer and view or listen to them in another room.

So a couple weeks ago I decided to try out a function of the playstation 3. I knew it could connect to your network to access files and the internet, etc; I just hadn't tried it.

The internet here at the house is wireless. It comes into the house via the tv cable and the high speed wireless router. So to connect the Playstation 3 to the network involved just connecting it with an ethernet cable to the router.

Ta Da

It will now play any video, music or photo file on the tv....

or



You can access the internet.

Now all I need to do is install adobe flash and I can listen to my xm radio through the stereo.

Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon

The pictures below are from what is called Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. The leaves were supposed to be at peak. This area is about an hour away from where we live. Between here and there we saw alot of color but unfortunately at this spot peak color seems to be another week or so away.

Darfur, Armenia, Bosnia, Wounded Knee

Genocide - Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of the CPPCG defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Understandably we want to keep focused on the past so we can police the present. Darfur cries out for humanity but yet we stand still. How can that be when we can be so noble to invade a county and topple its leader to rid that country of his tyranny but yet we stand in collective silence at an ongoing tragedy?

It's pathetic.

So, in a vane attempt at trying to climb and claim some resemblance of our once moral high ground we want to label an atrocity and bring it back to the present. Can we really do this without first looking into the mirror at our past and the atrocities we have commited?

I think not.

I think we can all agree to the definition above but what purpose does it serve to point a finger at anyone else before we point it to ourselves? I don't get it. From our earliest actions as a newly liberated country we systematically choked our native peoples until they were a shadow of their former selves. We made treaties with them only to break them later. We moved them from their ancestral lands, to areas that were to be unsustainable to themselves and the generations that would follow.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the attempt of some members of congress that want to label what happened to the Turkish Armenians over 100 years ago as genocide. It may or may not meed the international definitions. What I do disagree with is that no mention of our past misdeeds was made.

We need to clean our moral closet first.

One More For The Road

I went to see a new knee Dr this week. I had to see a specialist who has done the kind of work I have had done to my knee. The last operation was a resurfacing of the patella and femur. It is very highly specialized surgery so didn't make sense to see a regular orthopod.

So...He had me do some blood work to check for infection. If there is no infection...and there is no reason to believe that I do but you never know, looks like another surgery on the left knee.

Yup, that would make surgery number 10 on the left.

The knee isn't tracking as smooth as it should over these artificial pieces so he wan't to go in and take a look at what's going on. It is not really anything that can be done with an MRI, oh well. If there is damage to the new parts it looks like I would be set for a total knee replacement. Not something I am looking forward to by any means. Wayyyy tooo young. I guess I will find out when I see him again next week.

Let's see

1984 arthroscopy L knee
1987 arthroscopy L knee
1990 arthroscopy L knee and open ACL replacement
1994 arthroscopy L knee
1996 arthroscopy L knee
1997 2nd ACL replacement via arthroscope
1997 arthroscopy L knee
2003 arthroscopy L knee
2004 patella femoral arthroplasty (resurfacing) L knee

UGH!!!

October 11, 2007

Yesturday we got some good news. Zachary was diagnosed with epilepsy several years ago. I don't think I ever saw him having a seizure. Thank god he's only had one grand mal. All but that big one was him just zoning out and his arm shaking. We did our routine yearly sleep study, although this time he didn't fall asleep but anyways the Dr. wants to ween him off his medication. It's better to try now when he is younger.

Yesturday finished buying our side excursions for our Thanksgiving trip to the big island of Hawaii. We're going to be busy but we have it planned where we have alot of free time just to explore.

On the night before we leave we be attending the luau our hotel (Waikaloa Marriot) has on Sunday night. Zachary and I will be taking a submarine tour of the reef and all three of us will be taking a 3 hour Hummer tour of the remote areas. The state has block off the lava flows since the recent erruptions so at least we should be able to see the volcano.

Should be lots of fun.

We fly from Philly to Minneapolis so I'll be waving to you brother Jim as we fly over Nevada.

October 2, 2007

It's been a while since I have posted. I have taken up genealogy and it seems to be going rather well. I am up to 2400 people and I try to work on it every day.

This past weekend our little town had a community yard sale. This involves a $5 fee to our Christmas Tree Lighting Committee to be placed on a map and a small description of what you are selling. You also get a number to display on your house.

I picked up my number and map and come to find out they had us in the wrong location on the map. They were off by several blocks. The info o the back which was by address was correct but if you relied on the map alone you wouldn't have found us.

The yard sale started about 8am last Saturday. We had most of our stuff gone the night before in two sales. A neighbor from down the street bought most of my tools and a lady came by a little later and bought the exercise bike and ALL of Zack's clothes.

The funny thing was...Saturday afternoon a minivan pulled up and all these Amish women got out. They were pointing at toys....this would be good for Seth I heard one of them say. One of the women was looking at a couple of tools I had left. One was a table saw. She was interested but she wasn't sure....damn if you know that she pulled out a cell phone and called her husband.